Dwelling: A Novel

(Hardback)

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A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home-from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again. The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin Perhaps when Evie's mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice. And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners-the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie-parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed-has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems. And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home. A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel's Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero's journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment-for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

Reviews

Advance Praise for Dwelling

"Kivel debuts with a rollicking and resonant modern fairy tale of real estate and its discontents... as [she] brings her weird and wonderful cast of characters to vibrant life, she never drops the incisive real-world commentary on the housing crisis and rising inequality. The result is a sui generis delight."
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"A gorgeous novel of real estate, real emotions, and real warmth, with original hardware, original prose, and bursting with natural light. These pages are home to all things audacious and inventive, a dream house for the limits of your imagination--Dwelling is a daring, charming miracle."
--Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story

"At once philosophical, goofy, poetic and so, so smart--I would follow Emily Hunt Kivel anywhere."
--Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

"Festooned with razor-sharp observations and style, Emily Hunt Kivel's debut is a tale for our precarious moment, treating the melancholy facets of social decay, austerity, and gentrification with dazzling wit and originality. Dwelling announces the arrival of a new voice in literature who is exhilaratingly up to the task."
--Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

"Dwelling is a stunner of a novel. A new take on a classic Alice: humble seeker roving the dream map of our broken world, in search of a better one. This story is brave enough, joyous enough, and has the brilliance and heart of giants, that it already feels like the best new novel of the year."
--Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8

Author Bio

Emily Hunt Kivel is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, American Short Fiction, New England Review, and Guernica, among other publications. She teaches at St. Edward's University and Columbia University. Dwelling is her first novel.